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Editing audio in Linux

Audacity

It's difficult to say where Audacity lies in relation to proprietary audio editors. It's not quite a DAW on par with ProTools or Nuendo. It's too versatile and feature laden to compare to the myriad of sub-US$100 editors out there. Additionally, the fact that Audacity can be scripted using a Lisp derivative called Nyquist, confirms the fact that Audacity is rather unlike anything available elsewhere.

For its opening act, Audacity dusts the various budget audio editors out there. With no limit on the number of tracks and up to 32bit, 96kHz audio, it's clear that Audacity isn't playing softball. To drive that point home, Audacity supports VST and LADSPA plugins, the latter of which gives a person lots of power and choice at no cost. Its editing performance is zesty, though not quite as speedy as Ardour. In short, it seems to have all the prerequisites of a perfectly capable audio editor. Its lack of a mixer, busses, and other useful session management tools makes it not quite a DAW, but it's fine for smaller projects.

A lot of focus seems to have been given to Audacity's GUI. Where Ardour seeks to make the GUI efficient, Audacity has sought to make it user friendly and easy to learn. Upon opening Audacity the transport controls are front, center, and almost overly large, allowing a novice to start recording with about the same ease as a handheld tape recorder. The rest of the GUI is clear, uncluttered, and unintimidating, allowing a shallow learning curve, perhaps at the expense of efficiency.

Audacity's user friendliness extends to its technical abilities. It allows one to open mp3, Ogg Vorbis, and various lossless audio files directly, as well as saving to those formats. Its suave looks are furthered by its snazzy looking spectrograms. And it comes packaged with a full complement of filters. Considering its Linux, OS X, and Windows support, Audacity is an audio editor that has a firm grasp on usability and appeal to the novice user.

Look at all them spectral components... purrrty.

But to title Audacity good for amateurs and to leave it at that would be an injustice. Audacity does have some features that would appeal to more hardcore types. In particular, I'm speaking of its use of Nyquist as a scripting language. Nyquist is a audio synthesis language based on Lisp and written by Roger B. Dannenburg. Using Nyquist, a user can write his or her own plugins, not unlike using Script-Fu and Perl-Fu in The GIMP. To do this, you place an ASCII file with the extension ".ny" in /usr/share/audacity/plug-ins (or elsewhere on Windows or OS X). For example, one of the plugins that comes with audacity looks like this

How cool is that? Nyquist could be used to help with repetitive tasks, or to create plugins the like of which have never been heard since Thomas Dolby.

A few months ago I was playing around with Nyquist apart from Audacity. The impression I got was that it is amazingly elegant, easy to use, intuitive, and fun, but dead. The mailing list gets about one post a month on average. Don't let that discourage you, though. With Audacity's new support and the Audacity-Nyquist mailing list, its quite possible that Nyquist is experiencing a renaissance. It appears that despite my personal experience there are quite a number of people developing plugins with Nyquist.

Nyquist could serve to open up a lot of possibilities for making Audacity more interesting to experienced users. For a casual editing Audacity is a pretty good meeting of capability and ease of use. Of course this achievement entails some compromises, and Audacity lacks the right features, performance, and user interface to be used for large production projects. Audacity makes up for this with some innovative features that can't be found in similarly accessible editors.